At the SemperVirens Summit 2025, a fireside discussion titled "Evolving Workforce Transformation: Mastering Skills Inventory (with AI-driven strategies)" brought together industry leaders to tackle one of the most pressing challenges facing modern enterprises. Moderated by Raquel Scott, Senior Associate at Semper Virens, the panel featured Andreas De Neve, Co-Founder and CEO of TechWolf; Jill Larsen, Chief People Officer at Synopsys; Parker Mitchell, CEO of Valence; and Jordana Kammerund, CHO of Corning.

While the discussion covered AI coaching and leadership development, the most compelling insights emerged from the Andreas-Jill dialogue on skills visibility at scale. Their conversation revealed why traditional methods fail and what actually works when you're managing skills for tens of thousands of employees.

Key takeaways

The scale problem is real‍

"Maintaining a skills database by survey doesn't work at this scale," Andreas explained. With tens of thousands of workers each having dozens of evolving skills, manual tracking becomes impossible.

Inference beats input

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TechWolf's breakthrough: analyzing existing work data (JIRA tickets, project contributions) to automatically infer skills rather than relying on self-assessments. "We look at data that's very close to the work that's actually happening."

Hidden talent discovery‍

At Synopsys, TechWolf's analysis of 4,000 employees revealed 70-80% skills overlap between sales engineers and product engineers—insight no leader suspected, unlocking massive internal mobility opportunities.

Skills as infrastructure‍

Jill's strategic approach: treating skills data as foundational infrastructure rather than another HR application. "We're going to build the skills platform through TechWolf...very similar as a data lake."

Game-changing Results

From the TechWolf analysis, we actually learned that about 70 to 80% of the jobs are similar and the skills are similar between our AE population [sales engineers] and our product engineering population—which none of our leaders knew and we didn't know. So what that means is we can actually have a lot more velocity and agility between those two populations. The cost of productivity of moving people around is a lot faster than the cost of productivity of hiring from the outside in a very rare skill set environment.
Jill Larsen, Chief People Officer, Synopsys

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